NPR Begins the Slide to Irrelevance

Current.org, a trade magazine for public media has an article about NPR in which they spout a marketing study as some kind of scientific theory.  The strength of my disdain for the entire marketing industry is difficult to express.  I decided to point out to the author and NPR how fucked up stupid this idea is with the following letter:

Cc:  NPR ombudsman

re:  http://www.current.org/audience/aud1017npr-opportunities.shtml

Dear Karen Everhart,

I'll be up front and tell you that I think "marketing" is generally a complete and utter fraud run by shallow, simple fools that believe in what they're doing while it drains dry the businesses it advises and our society in general.  This "study" is marketing research and in my mind is about as plausible as Scientology.

That being said, there is one enormous problem with the idea NPR can "expand" its audience by becoming more "accessible" (read:  by dumbing itself down):  As NPR attempts to lighten its content it will lose the people that already listen to NPR.  The television news networks did this same thing in the late 70's to "capture the youth demographic" and the result was that the people that watched the news quit watching it because it was more flash and chattiness, cute pandas and celebrity gossip than news.  None of the kids started watching it because it was the NEWS.  So viewership continues slowly to decline.  All sorts of attempts have been made to place blame on societal changes, different age groups, etc. but the fact is the people that don't listen to NPR aren't going to start but those that do listen to NPR may very well stop listening as the programming gets reduced to stupidity.  A perfect example of this is the flagship talk show Talk of the Nation.  This show has been dropped by stations around the country since it was broken up into multiple short segments around 2001 by the current host to "keep it moving."  Well, the reason people listened to the show was to hear long, serious discussions with experts about complicated issues.  You can't have that when your programming is designed to "keep it moving" and "give it energy."  As a result I know I quit listening to TOTN a few years ago and it was removed from my local NPR's lineup without so much as a whimper of protest from local listeners.  They had to keep Science Friday or the listeners would have stormed the station with pitchforks and torches.  Why?  Because Science Friday tackles difficult questions without dumbing it down and isn't afraid to bump the next subject if the host senses they have really started to make headway in explaining the topic.

I've sensed for years that NPR was heading down the road of listening to marketing professionals and focus groups rather than trying to report the news as thoroughly as possible.  This study and your cheerleading coverage of it I'm sure will be more nails in the coffin of one of the few reliable news sources we still have in this country.

Sincerely,

Alan Miller

The Shrill Voices in the Week's "News"

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"There Are Countries Where a Single-Payer System Works Pretty Well"

So are even the newspapers so in the thrall of the gigantic insurance and healthcare industry that they won't even report when the President says something good about single payer health care? Apparently so:

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama told the American Medical Association yesterday that he believes single-payer health care systems have worked "pretty well" in some countries, but no major U.S. newspaper available in the Nexis database reported the president's comment in their news stories about the speech...

(Harper's) - ... However, three of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers—the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times— did publish quotes from the president’s speech that artfully took language from both immediately before and after the president’s statement that single-payer systems work. “I’ll be honest,” Obama said in his speech to the AMA, “there are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well.” A search of the the terms “Obama,” “single-payer,” and “pretty well” in the “Major Newspapers” file of Nexis turned up no hits as of 3:00 PM on Tuesday, June 16.

Why NPR Should Fire Cokie Roberts

I was outraged at the time and now I find I'm not even vaguely alone:

In the end, it wasn't close. By an overwhelming margin, criticism by Cokie Roberts, NPR contributing senior news analyst and ABC political commentator, of then-Sen. Barack Obama for choosing Hawaii, the state of his birth, to take his August family vacation was the most popular entry in Media Matters for America's poll for Most Inane Punditry of the 2008 presidential campaign. Readers chose Roberts' comments -- which included her characterizing Hawaii, where Obama vacations regularly, as "foreign, exotic" -- in greater numbers than her two closest competitors combined. Roberts stated: "I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place," adding, "He should be in Myrtle Beach, and, you know, if he's going to take a vacation at this time."

...

Vote totals in percentages*:

Cokie Roberts on Obama's Hawaii vacation: "I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state," but it looks "foreign, exotic"	38.65
Scarborough on Obama's "dainty" bowling performance: "Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man"	16.76
Barnes: Obama not "strong on national security" because he opposed war "when the entire world believed" Saddam had WMD	16.71
Brooks thinks Obama wouldn't seem to "fit[] in naturally" at an Applebee's salad bar -- maybe because Applebee's doesn't have them	5.95
Defending Givhan's cleavage coverage, Harwood asserted "calculati[ng]" Clinton knew "what she was communicating by her dress"	5.79
Fox News' Hill criticizes Clinton for leaving too large a tip, accuses her of "spending like a Learjet liberal"	5.59
On Hardball, Matthews and Shuster critiqued Obama's "weird" beverage selection at Indiana diner	4.80
Matthews on Obama shooting pool: "[I]t's not what most people play. People with money play pool these days"	2.48
Matthews: "Who would win a street fight ... Rudy Giuliani or President Ahmadinejad"	2.30
Politico's Simon now on to a different part of Romney's anatomy: "shoulders you could land a 737 on"	0.97

Personally I can't understand why anyone who has so obviously bought into an ideological argument (i.e. "Obama is the other.") would be allowed to report news or give opinions about news by any self respecting news organization, especially one as respected as NPR. Her opinion is worthless and it disgusts me that NPR is still paying this woman to spout bullshit while laying off actual journalists. Let her go work at Fox Noise where facts have nothing to do with what they broadcast and where "opinion" is all that matters and calling someone's home state "exotic" or a common hand geture "a terrorist fist bump" is just the way things are done but get her off of NPR while there is still something left to respect there.

(Someday soon I will rant about NPR's religious segments on their news. American churches have broader media coverage than NPR so they really don't deserve the attention NPR gives them, I don't care who the fuck is giving them money to do it.)

Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4

Quotes from BBC Friday Comedy News Quiz

"If we could be allowed to drop our tone of cynicism for a moment, it's bloody marvelous Obama's been elected, isn't it?"

"When Obama said that John McCain had endured things that most of us could not begin to imagine I immediately thought of brunch with the Palins."

"Every president has had an idiot brother, except for Bush who turned out to be the idiot brother."

"No one dared to believe that Americans would put aside their prejudices and elect a president with a brain."